by josh » Mon Dec 17, 2007 11:04 am
The background here is that the eaten message log itself is very heavy. In the early days, we experimented with preserving more information, and found that we very easily tanked the server when we pushed it too far - that's why you only get three, and why it's off by default. Only just over 13k users have it enabled, and that's about 8% of the user base.
On the other hand, it might be feasible to merely display the last three addresses to which a message was forwarded, without the extra information (like the sender, for instance), but it will still require a change to the database (adding another timestamp column to a table with over three million records) that we'd need to fret about a bit, because we don't have a good load testing environment.